Palestinian fedayeen
Palestinian fedayeen are militants or guerrillas of a nationalist orientation from among Palestinian Arabs. Most Palestinians consider the fedayeen to be freedom fighters, while most Israelis consider them to be terrorists.
Considered symbols of the Palestinian national movement, the Palestinian fedayeen drew inspiration from guerrilla movements in Vietnam, China, Algeria, and Latin America. The ideology of the Palestinian fedayeen was mainly left-wing nationalist, socialist or communist, and their proclaimed purpose was to defeat Zionism, claim Palestine and establish it as "a secular, democratic, nonsectarian state". The meaning of secular, democratic, and non-sectarian, however, greatly diverged among fedayeen factions.
Emerging from among the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their villages as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, in the mid-1950s the fedayeen began mounting cross-border operations into Israel from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Fedayeen attacks were directed on the Gaza and Sinai borders with Israel. As a result, Israel undertook retaliatory actions, targeting the fedayeen that also often targeted the citizens of their host countries, which in turn provoked more attacks. The earliest infiltrations were primarily against civilian targets, however, some infiltrations were against agricultural and military targets. The Gaza Strip, the sole territory of the All-Palestine Protectorate—a Palestinian state declared in October 1948—became the focal point of the Palestinian fedayeen activity.
Fedayeen actions were cited by Israel as one of the reasons for its launching of the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon. Palestinian fedayeen groups were united under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization after the defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War, though each group retained its own leader and independent armed forces.
Definitions of the term
The words "Palestinian" and "fedayeen" have had different meanings to different people at various points in history. According to the Sakhr Arabic-English dictionary, fida'i—the singular form of the plural fedayeen—means "one who risks his life voluntarily" or "one who sacrifices himself". In their book The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Tony Rea and John Wright have adopted this more literal translation, translating the term fedayeen as "self-sacrificers".In his essay, "The Palestinian Leadership and the American Media: Changing Images, Conflicting Results", R.S. Zaharna comments on the perceptions and use of the terms "Palestinian" and "fedayeen" in the 1970s, writing:
Edmund Jan Osmańczyk's Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements defines fedayeen as "Palestinian resistance fighters", whereas Martin Gilbert's The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict defines fedayeen as "Palestinian terrorist groups". Robert McNamara refers to the fedayeen simply as "guerrillas", as do Zeev Schiff and Raphael Rothstein in their work Fedayeen: Guerrillas Against Israel. Fedayeen can also be used to refer to militant or guerrilla groups which are not Palestinian.
Beverly Milton-Edwards describes the Palestinian fedayeen as "modern revolutionaries fighting for national liberation, not religious salvation," distinguishing them from mujahaddin. While the fallen soldiers of both mujahaddin and fedayeen are called shahid by Palestinians, Milton nevertheless contends that it would be political and religious blasphemy to call the "leftist fighters" of the fedayeen.
History
1948 to 1956
into Israel first emerged among the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, living in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. Initially, most infiltrations were economic in nature, with Palestinians crossing the border seeking food or the recovery of property lost in the 1948 war.Between 1948 and 1955, emigration of Palestinians to the nascent State of Israel was opposed by Arab governments, with the goal being the prevention of escalation into another war. The problem of establishing and guarding the demarcation line separating the All-Palestine Protectorate in Gaza from the Israeli-held Negev area proved vexing, largely due to the presence of over 200,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza area. The terms of the armistice agreement restricted Egypt's use and deployment of regular armed forces in the Gaza Strip. In keeping with this restriction, the Egyptian government's solution was to form a Palestinian paramilitary police force. The Palestinian border police was created in December 1952. The border police were placed under the command of 'Abd-al-Man'imi 'Abd-al-Ra'uf, a former Egyptian air brigade commander, Muslim Brotherhood member, and Revolutionary Council member. The training of 250 Palestinian volunteers started in March 1953, with further volunteers coming forward for training in May and December. Some border police personnel were attached to the military governor's office under 'Abd-al-'Azim al-Saharti to guard public installations in the Gaza Strip. After an Israeli raid on an Egyptian military outpost in Gaza in February 1955, during which 37 Egyptian soldiers were killed, the Egyptian government began to actively sponsor fedayeen raids into Israel.
The first insurrection by Palestinian fedayeen may have been launched from Syrian territory in 1951, though most attacks between 1951 and 1953 were launched from Jordanian territory. According to Yehoshafat Harkabi, former head of Israeli military intelligence, these early infiltrations were limited "incursions", initially motivated by economic reasons, including the crossing of Palestinians into Israel to harvest crops in their former villages. Gradually, they developed into violent robbery and deliberate terrorist attacks as the fedayeen drew new recruits from the refugee population.
In 1953, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion tasked Ariel Sharon, then security chief of the Northern Region, with setting up a new commando unit, Unit 101, designed to respond to fedayeen infiltrations. After one month of training, "a patrol of the unit that infiltrated into the Gaza Strip as an exercise encountered Palestinians in al-Bureij refugee camp, opened fire to rescue itself and left behind about 30 killed Arabs and dozens of wounded." In its five-month existence, Unit 101 was also responsible for carrying out the Qibya massacre on the night of 14–15 October 1953 in the Jordanian village of the same name. Cross-border operations by Israel were conducted in both Egypt and Jordan "to 'teach' the Arab leaders that the Israeli government saw them as responsible for these activities, even if they had not directly conducted them." Moshe Dayan felt that retaliatory action by Israel was the only way to convince Arab countries that, for the safety of their own citizens, they should work to stop fedayeen infiltrations. Dayan stated, "We are not able to protect every man, but we can prove that the price for Jewish blood is high."
According to Martin Gilbert, between 1951 and 1955, 967 Israelis were killed in what he claims were Arab terrorist attacks, a figure Benny Morris characterizes as "pure nonsense". Morris explains that Gilbert's fatality figures are "3-5 times higher than the figures given in contemporary Israeli reports" and that they seem to be based on a 1956 speech by David Ben-Gurion in which he uses the word nifga'im to refer to "casualties" in the broad sense of the term.
According to the Jewish Agency for Israel, between 1951 and 1956, 400 Israelis were killed and 900 wounded in fedayeen attacks. Dozens of these attacks are today cited by the Israeli government as major Arab terrorist attacks against Israelis prior to the 1967 Six-Day War.
United Nations reports indicate that between 1949 and 1956, Israel launched more than seventeen raids on Egyptian territory and 31 attacks on Arab towns or military forces. From late 1954 onwards, larger-scale fedayeen operations were mounted from Egyptian territory. The Egyptian government supervised the formal establishment of fedayeen groups in Gaza and the northeastern Sinai Peninsula. General Mustafa Hafez, commander of Egyptian army intelligence in the mid-1950s, is said to have founded Palestinian fedayeen units "to launch terrorist raids across Israel's southern border," nearly always against civilians. In a speech on 31 August 1955, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein said:
In 1955, it is reported that 260 Israeli citizens were killed or wounded in fedayeen terrorist attacks. Some believe fedayeen attacks contributed to the outbreak of the Suez Crisis, and the attacks were cited by Israeli government officials as the reason for undertaking the 1956 Sinai campaign. Others argue that Israel "engineered eve-of-war lies and deceptions.... to give Israel the excuse needed to launch its strike", such as presenting a group of "captured fedayeen" to journalists who were in fact Israeli soldiers.
In 1956, Israeli troops entered Khan Yunis in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, conducting house-to-house searches for Palestinian fedayeen and weaponry. During the operation, 275 Palestinians were killed, with an additional 111 killed in Israeli raids on the Rafah refugee camp. Israeli officials contended the killings resulted from refugee resistance, which Chomsky claims was denied by the refugees themselves. There were no Israeli casualties in the raids.
Suez Crisis
On 29 October 1956, the first day of Israel's invasion of the Sinai Peninsula, Israeli forces attacked fedayeen units in the towns of Ras al-Naqb and Kuntilla. Two days later, fedayeen destroyed water pipelines in Kibbutz Ma'ayan along the Lebanese border, and began a campaign of mining in the area, which lasted throughout November. In the first week of November, similar attacks occurred along the Syrian and Jordanian borders, the Jerusalem corridor, and in the Wadi Ara region—although the state armies of both those countries are suspected as the saboteurs. On 9 November, four Israeli soldiers were injured after their vehicle was ambushed by fedayeen near the city of Ramla; several water pipelines and bridges were sabotaged in the Negev.During the invasion of the Sinai, Israeli forces killed fifty fedayeen on a lorry in Ras Sedr. After Israel took control of the Gaza Strip, dozens of fedayeen were killed: Sixty-six were killed in screening operations in the area, and a US diplomat estimated that of the 500 fedayeen captured by the Israel Defense Forces, about 30 were killed.